I arrived in West Germany on a Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) assignment in fall 1984, during a high point of peace movement opposition to the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles. I spent a month in language study at the university town of Marburg.

One weekend I joined a group of students traveling to the Fulda Gap border region to obstruct NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) military maneuvers and was overwhelmed by the U.S. military presence there. The first day I counted nearly 40 tanks. They rumbled down small village streets and positioned themselves in fields or playgrounds to fight street battles. Soldiers with painted faces and M-16s huddled in doorways and darted down alleys in house-to-house combat. Fighter jets thundered by at elevations of 150 yards or less.

I was angry that this idyllic countryside had been turned into a military playground (I tried to imagine the same scene in Lancaster County, Pa.). And I cheered German students when they stood in the way of tanks and removed or changed maneuver signs.

I remember a young GI peering out of a tank at the people blocking his way. He didn't know what to do. The GIs in the next tank yelled at him to charge ahead. The students on the road laughed at him. Some shouted and hurled foul names. No one tried to talk to him. It struck me that, like the military commanders and politicians, the students also had rigid Feinbilder (enemy images).

The man in the tank reminded me of tenants I had learned to know in the innercity of Washington, D.C. For many, the army was the only job they could find, an escape from the dead end of unemployment, crime and jail, and often safer than the streets of their own neighborhood. Now this GI was crouched in a tank, surrounded by angry Germans. What does it mean to love your enemies in this setting? I asked myself.

This was the first step of a journey that led me to the Hunsruck three years later to start an experiment in relating to GIs and their families. For me personally it has been an effort to learn to love my enemies. With my friends in the German peace movement, it has been a chance to try to integrate strategies of dialogue.

Perhaps for Mennonites in North America it can be a challenge to stop taking the long detour around Samaria and to start walking with our estranged cousins -- the young women and men, the wives and mothers, the teenagers and children on American military bases throughout the world.¹

^1. I owe this analogy to Brent Foster, a Mennonite and former U.S Marine, now working with Mennonite Board of Missions, Elkhart, Ind.